When co-creating with our partner communities, OpenArchive uses a deliberately slow and in-depth human rights centered research and design methodology to threat-model and create personas in order to map out the use cases and ecosystem. Through this co-research, we are able to identify key pain points and threats these communities face and incorporate this research into building responsive, usable tools to help mitigate harm and technological challenges.
During this process, we create realistic personas based on the actual people we work with in our partner communities. "User personas are [anonymized] archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users" (Patrick Faller). Personas can help remind you of real-world constraints, and also help you document and build up necessary internal information about why you’re building something, and the needs of who you’re building with.
See below for some examples of our personas.
